Composing discourse parenthetical reports

Abstract

Hunter (2016) proposed that a speech report with a parenthetical interpretation but non-parenthetical syntax will contribute a modal discourse relation of the form ?R to discourse logical form. This paper provides a compositional account of the mechanism by which these modal relations are triggered. It then extends Hunter’s proposal to reports involving factive embedding verbs and provides an explanation of why explicit discourse connectives sometimes block parenthetical readings of reports in their scope.